.Kodak reports on: a water-based lacquer.. • 19 pages of savvy on schlieren . . . paste, beautiful paste
Creamed butyrate In this nation of do-it-yourselfers and of housewives capable of taking the bit in their own teeth when occasion demands, do you think there would be a market for a cream that can be spread over bare wood with cheesecloth to deposit in seconds a surface chemically and physically identical to a coat of highest quality lacquer? We have made such a cream—a stable, freeze-and-thaw-resistant water emulsion of the same kind of cellulose acetate butyrate on which the best grades of conventional lacquers are based. The cream eliminates separate fillers, sealers and wash coats, long drying periods, excessive sanding operations, and spraying equipment. With one, two, or three coats a range of effects can be produced from a flat "natural" surface to a rich, semiglossy, "rubbed" surface. The fast film formation permits application of successive coats within minutes and eliminates the problem of surface imperfections from dust in the air. The successive coats do not soften or attack those previously applied. Instead of sanding and polishing of the dried film, gentle rubbing as the film forms fills the irregularities in the wood and smooths out the top of the lacquer. Though water-based, the cream does not raise grain as one might expect. After drying, the film has good resistance to water. It adheres well to the wood, seals it well, prevents penetration of subsequently applied conventional finishes (if they are desired) but holds them tenaciously. The product itself is almost waterwhite, with the color stability to sunlight for which all cellulose acetate butyrate coatings have been esteemed. It neither darkens wood nor is itself darkened with the passage of time.
Thin air can be photographed The technique of schlieren photography has now been debased to the point where a man can send in to Kodak for a free booklet on how to do it, can carefully read all 19 pages, and can set himself up as a schlieren man. Yes, and perhaps a case can be made that it is not necessarily immoral to go at it just that way. Though the schlieren method of photographing refractive index gradients in gases and liquids has been around for quite a while, general literature about it is scant; most of what has been published about it dwells on some particular application. You can find packaged schlieren outfits advertised, but the advertisements are lowpressure. Everybody who is doing schlieren now learned the hard way and is entitled to respect. One such savvy schlieren group works at Battelle Memorial Institute and another at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc.
Here is an enchanting display item from Battelle's gallery—a turbulent All these interesting properties we have Bunsen flame, frozen in a 13-microdemonstrated to our own satisfaction. The second schlieren portrait. Areas lighter intricacies of marketing such a product than background represent decreasing through paint stores, supermarkets, five- index in an arbitrary direction within and-dimes, or similarly formidable retail channels fill us with dismay. Therefore we the plane of the picture; darker areas represent change in the opposite dithought we would here ask around what companies are interested in trying to make rection. To measure the quantitative hay with this lovely development. (We our- rate of change with distance demands selves incline to confine our consumer marketing to the photographic kind of film the very considerable elaboration of interferometric technique. A third and cameras, projectors, and associated merchandised) If indeed there are any such method, called shadow photography, companies, Eastman Chemical Products delineates the second derivative of reInc., Kingsport, Tenn. (Subsidiary of Eastfractive index with distance. Our slim man Kodak Company) will tell them all volume merely hints at the existence about emulsified butyrate.
of these other methods. Given enough encouragement to expand it some day, we might cover them in useful detail. To start encouraging us, send for "Schlieren Photography'9 to Eastman Kodak Company, Special Sensitized Products Division, Rochester 4, N. Y.
Amylose and culture Spaghetti and macaroni are basic. The idea of making wheat flour up into a paste and drying it for future use must have come very early. Enter esthetics. The human spirit must be nourished along with the human body. For reasons apparently unrelated to biological metabolism, the paste must be dried in certain shapes, and the integrity of these shapes must be preserved right to the pearly portal of the alimentary tract. This principle is ancient: the ancient Romans ate spaghetti with cheese; the ancient Japanese ate macaroni pressed from a paste of cooked rice. When spaghetti or macaroni is cooked for too long or allowed to stand cooked, the human spirit is offended. The morsels of pasta revert to a sticky paste, millenia of cultural advance undone because amylose has gone into solution and then has loosely hydrogen-bonded itself into a net of slime. But for this unfortunate tendency, the world's food supply would be less dependent on specialized durum wheats. Without them, the spaghetti and macaroni would get even stickier even faster. The problem now appears to be as soluble as the amylose itself. First fruits of the victory can already be tasted. Try any of the up-to-date dehydrated potato-flake brands. See how the dish instantly prepared from it compares with freshly and expertly cooked home-whipped potato. Whatever the future holds for spaghetti and macaroni, the reason the instant-potato thing works out so well is that the processors add a very small percentage of pure monoglyceride. It complexes the dissolved amylose so securely that even the familiar iodine-blue test can scarcely find it. These Myverol Distilled Monoglycerides we prepare by glycerolysis of familiar vegetable and animal food fats. They are officially recognized as safe. Investigators who would like samples of them with which to try remedying stickiness in any starchy foods are invited to write Distillation Products Industries, Rochester 3, N. Y. (Division of Eastman Kodak Company).
y. This is another advertisement w h e r e Eastman Kodak Company probes a t random for mutual interests and occasionally a little revenue from those whose w o r k has something to do with science 66
C&EN
KoMili
